Color is a powerful means of communication and plays an important part in our everyday lives. Color can sway thinking, change actions, and cause reactions. It can irritate or soothe your eyes, raise your blood pressure or suppress your appetite. Corporations have always used color as a source of brand recognition and advertising. For example, it is a well known fact that in the majority of cases blue light suppresses appetite while red light increases hunger. For this reason, rarely are food advertisements the color blue or do you see blue light in restaurants. A University of Loyola, Md. study concluded that color increases brand recognition by up to 80 percent. Another independent study conducted by the secretariat of the Seoul International Color Expo 2004 yielded results which demonstrate the power of color in marketing. According to the survey, 92.6% of respondents said that they put most importance on visual factors when purchasing products, and when asked to approximate the importance of color by percentage when buying products, 48% of the respondents said 50-70 percent while 36.7 percent said 70-100 percent. This means that as much as 84.7 percent of the total respondents think that color accounts for more than half among the various factors important for choosing products.
Color does not just merely enhance memory and recollection of a product, but it also can subtly and quickly affect the decision making processes. In fact, CCICOLOR—Institute for Color Research studies concluded that people make a subconscious judgment about a product within 90 seconds of initial viewing and that between 62% and 90% of that assessment is based on color alone. Further research by the Henley Centre suggests that 73% of purchasing decisions are now made in-store. These studies further highlight the use of color in catching consumers' attention and quickly conveying brand identity to them to result in more successful sales.
Color influences brand identity in a variety of ways. Consider the success Heinz EZ Squirt Blastin' Green ketchup has had in the marketplace. More than 10 million bottles were sold in the first seven months following its introduction, with Heinz factories working 24 hours a day, seven days a week to keep up with demand. The result: $23 million in sales attributable to Heinz green ketchup (the highest sales increase in the brand's history). All because of a simple color change. Apple brought color into a marketplace where color had not been seen before. By introducing the colorful iMacs, Apple was the first to say, “It doesn't have to be beige”. The iMacs reinvigorated a brand that had suffered $1.8 billion of losses in two years.
Different brands are recognized world wide for their corporate colors. For example, in soft drinks, the first brand associated with red is usually the Coca-Cola Company. Their branding is such a force in today's beverage market that red can almost be associated with Cola in general as several other major brands including Qibla and Tab among privately labeled grocery store brands all use red for advertising. In contrast to the Coca-Cola red is Pepsi who markets their brand in blue. The corporate colors of these two brands create distinction and uniqueness between their respective products.